Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

In this webinar, expert in eBooks Meredith Wemhoff discusses ways to engage and support learners with special needs using eBooks and audio. Using the case-study of an independent all-boys school located in Surrey, the school provides special needs students an opportunity to succeed and thrive. Many arrive to the 80-year-old institution with low self-confidence, often due to struggles they faced in traditional educational institutions caused by learning and language difficulties. This means providing a collection that meets the individual learning needs of the school's 470 students, who range in age from 8-18. ​​​​​​​ During this eye-opening webinar, Meredith will share the story of selecting, launching and promoting a digital library service that helps address learning challenges. Attendees will come away with best practices for bringing ebooks and audiobooks to their school and real-life examples of these practices in action. Don't miss out, register today!

Multimedia presentations can enrich education and enhance learning for many students, but it can also pose barriers for others. Audio and video are inaccessible to people who are unable to hear, and video is inaccessible to people who are unable to see critical information that is presented visually. Other students are impacted by low bandwidth Internet connections. Multimedia players can pose barriers as well if the player controls require use of a mouse or if they are not labeled sufficiently to be usable by screen reader users.

More and more schools, colleges and universities are using online educational tools that students are required to use to obtain course syllabi, access lectures and associated material, participate in class discussions, read course material, and receive grades and feedback from instructors. These popular tools, such as Blackboard, can frequently pose significant barriers to students with vision loss because they do not work well, if at all, with computer programs commonly used by students who are blind or visually impaired to access content displayed on the computer screen. For example, screen reading software reads the contents of the screen aloud. Screen magnification software enlarges text and graphics displayed on the computer screen in a customized way.

"The practice of excluding students from schools is set to be placed under scrutiny with plans announced that the number of exclusions is set to be reported publicly in school league table data. The intention is to stop so-called "off-rolling", where schools remove difficult or low-achieving pupils. On average about 2,000 pupils are excluded from school each day - with 40 being permanently excluded."

"Incorporating the arts-rapping, dancing, drawing-into science lessons can help low-achieving students retain more knowledge and possibly help students of all ability levels be more creative in their learning, finds a new study by Johns Hopkins University. The findings were published on Feb. 7 in Trends in Neuroscience and Education and support broader arts integration in the classroom."

"Metacognition is widely accepted as "thinking about thinking", often inspired by the work in the 1970s of John Flavell, and its impact in educational circles cannot be denied. Indeed, John Hattie concluded that Metacognitive strategies have a positive impact score of D=0,69 - just outside the top ten of the most effective pedagogical strategies available to teachers - when sustained in the classroom. Additionally, the Educational Endowment Foundation advocate that Metacognition provides a 'high impact for low value', being easy to implement. Furthermore, Singapore's education system implemented Metacognition into their mathematics curriculum in the early 2000s, and their results speak for themselves."

"Training teachers to focus their attention on positive conduct and to avoid jumping to correct minor disruption improves child behaviour, concentration and mental health. A study led by the University of Exeter Medical School, published in Psychological Medicine, analysed the success of a training programme called the Incredible Years® Teacher Classroom Management Programme. Its core principles include building strong social relationship between teachers and children and ignoring low-level bad behaviour that often disrupts classrooms."

Online learning provider edX this week took a big step into the online degree space by announcing plans to launch nine low-cost, large-scale, fully online master's programs from selective institutions. The nonprofit company, one of the early providers of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, will offer the degrees from seven universities: the Georgia Institute of Technology; the University of Texas at Austin; Indiana University; the University of California, San Diego; Arizona State University and two Australian universities -- the University of Queensland and Curtin University.

"Students from some of England's worst-performing secondary schools who enrol on medical degrees with lower A Level grades, on average, do at least as well as their peers from top performing schools, a new study has revealed. The research also found that students from poorly performing schools who match the top A-Level grades achieved by pupils from the best performing schools, go on to do better during a medical degree."

"In an ideal world lessons would be learnt, progression would be made and everyone would get along. However, whether low-level comments or open warfare, conflict can impinge on the learning of pupils. And that is just when the teachers are arguing! In this session of UKEdChat we will discuss how to avoid conflict in the classroom, the staffroom and in the playground. Don't argue… just be on #UKEdChat at 8pm(UK)."

"Schools achieve amazing things everyday, especially when educators and students have the right resources and experience. However, with funding at chronically low levels in many education systems around the world, schools are looking for innovative ways to invest more funds into the classroom, beyond simply asking parents to make up the shortfall.  The idea of patronage for scholars and artisans by philanthropists is nothing new and has its roots in the ancient past."

Pedagogy and curriculum that engages students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds and is deemed personally relevant to the lives they live, are seen as important factors towards equality of outcome by Wrench, Hammond, McCallum and Price (2012). Their research involved designing a curriculum and pedagogy that would be highly engaging to students of low-socioeconomic status. 'The interventions involved curriculum redesigns that set meaningful, challenging learning task(s) (culminating in high quality learning products); strong connection to student life-worlds; and a performative expectation for student learning.' (Wrench et al 2012 p934)

"Not only do Montessori children do better overall than those in conventional preschools, but Montessori preschools help low-income children to perform as well as wealthier children Children in Montessori preschools show improved academic performance and social understanding, while enjoying their school work more, finds the first longitudinal study of Montessori education outcomes. Strikingly, children from low-income families, who typically don't perform as well at school, show similar academic performance as children from high-income families. Children with low executive function similarly benefit from Montessori preschools. The study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, suggests that well-implemented Montessori education could be a powerful way to help disadvantaged children to achieve their academic potential."

"Not all teachers succeed in staying happy with their work until the end of their career. Dissatisfied older teachers will tend to quit before reaching retirement age. Work overload, low status of the profession, disruptive student behaviour, and a poor relationship with students are reasons often mentioned for the declining job satisfaction of older teachers."

"Researchers say findings provide opportunity to target resources at new mental health initiatives in schools and local communities in order to tackle self-harm"

Despite your best efforts, your entire class seems to start experiencing a huge decline in motivation. What started out well, as you watched your students' curiosities be heightened, now feels like an attempt to lift something well beyond your capacity. You're experiencing "the dip," and it is a common occurrence. You may very well not have done anything wrong, to cause this to happen. However, there are plenty of strategies you can use to bring the motivation back in a course.

Positive school climates contribute to academic achievement and can improve outcomes for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds, according to a new study published today in Review of Educational Research, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association. In a comprehensive analysis of research published since 2000, U.S. and Israeli researchers found substantial evidence that schools with positive climates can narrow achievement gaps among students of different socioeconomic backgrounds and between students with stronger and weaker academic abilities...